Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Away from the limelight of urban cities, where an increasingly growing number of firms are fighting for a piece of India’s digital payments market, a South Korean startup’s app is quietly helping millions of Indians pay digitally and enjoy many financial services for the first time.

The app, called True Balance, began its life as a tool to help users easily find their mobile balance, or topping up pre-pay mobile credit. But in its four years journey, its ambition has significantly grown beyond that. Today, it serves as a digital wallet app that helps users pay their mobile and electricity bills, and it also lets users pay later.

One thing that has not changed for the parent company of True Balance, BalanceHero, which employs under 200 people, is its consumer focus. It is strictly catering to people in tier two and tier three markets — often dubbed as India 2 and India 3 — who have relatively limited access to the internet, and lower financial power. And it remains operational just in India.

Even as India is already the second largest internet market with more than 500 million users, more than half of its popular remains offline. In recent years, the nation has become a battleground for Silicon Valley giants and Chinese firms that are increasingly trying to win existing users and bring the rest of the population online.

And like many other companies, BalanceHero’s bet on India is beginning to pay off. The startup told TechCrunch today that it has clocked $100 million in GMV sales and has amassed about 60 million registered users. Yongsung Yoo, a spokesperson for the startup, added that BalanceHero, which has raised $42 million to date, is also nearing profitability.

The South Korean firm’s playbook is different from many other players that are racing to claim a slice of India’s burgeoning digital payments market. True Balance competes with the likes of Paytm, MobiKwik, Google, Amazon, and Walmart-owned Flipkart, though its competitors are still largely catering to the urban parts of India.

In the last two years, many firms have begun to explore smaller cities and towns, but their services are still too out-of-the-world for local residents. Raising awareness about digital services is a big challenge in such markets, Yoo said, so the startup is relying on existing users to help others make their first transactions and in paying bills.

Yoo said the startup rewards these “digital agents” with cashback and other benefits. For these digital agents, many of whom do not have a day job, True Balance has emerged as a side project to make extra money.

Later this year, Yoo said the startup, which recently also added support for UPI in its service, will open an e-commerce store on its app and also offer insurance to users. To accelerate its growth and expansion, True Balance is in final stages of raising between $50 million to $70 million in a new round that it expects to close in July this year, Yoo said.

Even before Computex officially started yesterday in Taipei, Lian Li’s combination chassis and standing workstations were already turning heads as attendees got to take a look at their interiors before the glass tops were installed. The insides of the DK-05 were clearly visible, looking like miniature water parks with a labyrinthine arrangement of tubes and lights.

 

The desks’ interiors aren’t completely obscured once the top is in place. Their tempered glass tops are foggy when the workstations are turned off, but once switched on, everything inside—its liquid cooling system, motherboards, graphics cards, motherboards, fans, reservoirs, pumps and whatever else else you add in—are clearly visible. The bright lights inside Nangang Exhibition Center made it hard to see, but the photo above from Lian Li’s website gives you a better idea of the full effect.

The larger DK-05 has USB 3.1 Type-c, USB 3.0 and HDMI ports and a 140cm by 78cm surface, making space for two monitors and plenty of peripheals (though you probably won’t want to cover it up). It boasts space for two extended ATX motherboards and a motorized height adjustment feature that takes it from 69 to 118 cm. You can preset four heights, useful if more than one person is using the workstation (and with a pricetag of about $1,999, it makes sense to share). A smaller version, the DK-04, costs about $1,300.

Northwestern Mutual is setting aside $150 million for a second venture fund.

“We’re committed to transforming the client experience to drive change within the financial services industry,” said Souheil Badran, executive vice president and chief innovation officer, in a statement. “This additional capital will allow us to build on the success of Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures and invest in new technologies that have the ability to accelerate growth and advance innovation so we can create what’s next for our clients, financial representatives and employees.”

Criteria for the fund won’t change. It will still invest between $500,000 and $5 million ins Series A or B stage deals focused on technologies that can address changing customer preferences; new user experiences for the insurance industry and consumers; digital health; data and analytics technologies that can power new products and services; and other strategic objectives.

Since its launch in 2017, Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures has backed 14 startups and invested $43 million. The much larger commitment the firm is making through this second investment vehicle proves that insurers are waking up to the importance of new technology companies in the old insurance business.

On the heels of customer service company Zendesk announcing an acquisition to expand its omni-channel offering, one of the upstarts nipping at its heels has announced a round of funding to continue growing its own platform.

Kustomer, a customer service startup that calls in data from multiple external channels and the software and apps that a company uses to manage its business internally and speak to customers externally, has raised a Series D of $40 million. led by Tiger Global with participation also from previous investor Battery Ventures. The plan will be to bring in more automation and AI processes to reduce more of the repetitive tasks around CRM — a move specifically aimed to help it target large enterprise customers — and to expand further into Europe, CEO Brad Birnbaum said in an interview.

The valuation is not being disclosed with this round, although Birnbaum noted that it is a “very significant uplift” on its previous valuation. Pitchbook, as one data point, notes that in its Series B, it was valued at around $121 million post-money. Adding another $75 million to that (Series C and D together), it’s close to $200 million, although that’s likely lower than its actual valuation now, given that uplift. It has raised just under $114 million to-date.

More tellingly, Kustomer has been on a fundraising tear in the last twelve months. It was just in January of this year that it announced a Series C of $35 million. Before that, in June 2018, it raised $26 million. (It was not on the hunt to raise another round so soon, and didn’t need the funding immediately, but it was approached by Tiger with an offer Kustomer did not want to pass up.)

In that time, Birnbaum — who co-founded the startup with Jeremy Suriel in 2015 — has told me multiple times about how Kustomer was increasingly winning more clients off Salesforce and Zendesk, with revenues growing by about 350 percent in the process with customers including Ring, Rent the Runway, Glossier, Away, Glovo, Slice, Abercrombie & Fitch and UNTUCKit.

So you might guess that Kustomer’s traction, along with a general swing in terms of what enterprises are looking for in a customer service solution, has had something to do with Zendesk’s own turn towards a more omni-channel approach.

Birnbaum and Suriel know something about how the bigger incumbents work: a previous startup they had worked on together, Assistly (where Birnbaum had been a founder too), was acquired by Salesforce.

Birnbaum does not shy away from talking about how Kustomer is faring against competitors, or why its platform is better than theirs.

“We are most proud of the fact that we do omnichannel really well. On our platform you have a threaded conversation, whereas on others the same input might resolve in four separate tickets,” he said. “In many ways, from a product perspective, I think Zendesk is chasing us, but our product is about ten years younger.”

Kustomer’s decision to use some of this latest investment to continue building out its automation and AI capabilities lines up with bigger developments that we have seen in enterprise software. Birnbaum, indeed, describes Kustomer’s automation of routine tasks as “a form of RPA” (robotic process automation, which has been one of the fastest-growing areas in enterprise software). “If you’re a retailer and someone ordered a shirt and it’s too small, through the Kustomer platform you can both take the order but also fix it if it’s not the right size, or take the return, rather than passing the customer on to another department,” he said. “You will start to see more and more of these developments as we continue building a system of record beyond a simple CRM tool.”

The next step, he said, will be building even more tools to understand the customer. “We are not a marketing platform today, but already people are using it that way, for example to find recently unhappy customers to send them offers, or do promotional outreach to those who have dropped off on their purchases.”

In addition to Tiger Global joining as an investor, Wendi Sturgis, the CEO of Yext Europe and Chief Client Officer at Yext, has joined Kustomer’s Board of Directors.

“Kustomer is one of the fastest-growing startups in its space, and I am pleased to join them on their mission to redefine what it means to truly put the customer first, radically shift the approach to customer management and ultimately manifest this in state-of-the-art marketing automation,” she said in a statement. “Plus, when it comes to leadership teams, I am drawn most to disruptors — but only those with the highest integrity. I could not have chosen better, in coming to work with Brad Birnbaum and the incredible team he has assembled.”

 

Last year during Computex, ASUS introduced the ZenBook Pro 14 and 15, with a touchscreen in place of a regular touchpad. This year, it took the concept of a built-in second screen and went much further with it, unveiling new versions of the ZenBook with even larger second screens. Instead of just replacing the touchpad, the 14-inch second screen on the new ZenBook Pro Duo extend all the way across the device above the keyboard, acting as both an extension and companion to the main 4K OLED 15.6-inch display.

The touchpad-replacement on last year’s ZenBook Pros seemed like a novelty, with the bonus of giving you a small, extra screen for messaging apps, videos and simple utility apps like a calculator. The much larger size of the second screen on the ZenBook Pro Duo, however, enables many new possibilities. Both of its screens are touchscreens and moving apps between the windows with your finger takes a little bit of getting used to, but it is simple and intuitive (frequently-used apps can also be pinned).

During a demo, an ASUS employee showed me how it can support dual displays of maps: the larger screen giving you a bird’s eye view of the geography, while the second screen allows you to zone in on streets and locations. But the ZenBook Pro Duo’s main draw is multitasking, enabling you to monitor your email, send messages, watch videos, keep an eye on news headlines and other tasks while you use the main screen to for apps like Office 365 or video conferences.

Basically, the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo 14 is designed to anyone who likes using a second monitor (or is tired of propping up their phone or tablet as an improvised second screen), but also wants a PC with more portability. At 2.5kg, the ZenBook Pro Duo is not the lightest laptop around, but still reasonably lightweight considering its specs and two screens.

Its Intel Core i9 HK processor and Nvidia RTX 20

60 ensures that both screens run smoothly, even with multiple tabs and apps open. ASUS also partnered with Harman/Kardon for its speakers, which means sound quality should be better than average. A smaller version, the ZenBook Duo, is also available, with Core i7 and a GeForce MX 250 and HD instead of 4K on both its displays.

ASUS hasn’t announced pricing and availability yet.

If you frequent the New York City subway’s 4, 5, 6 line, you’ve probably seen the new terminals at a variety of stations like Union Square and Grand Central. Located between turnstiles, they’ve all been sporting a curious “Test Phase/Coming Soon” screen. That finally changes this week.

Google already announced its mobile pay solution would be arriving this week, and now its chief competitor is getting in on the action. Apple Pay is hitting select stations this Friday, May 31. When that kicks in, riders will be able to swipe their iPhone or Apple Watch to catch a ride.

The kiosks are actually active, at present, but using them requires a software update — iOS 12.3 and watchOS 5.2.1, respectively. Then a debit or credit card needs to be associated with Express Transit in Apple Wallet, using Face or Touch ID. Once installed, it should work on the iPhone 6s and SE or later, along with the Apple Watch Series 1, 2 and 3, using NFC to get you in.

The system works as you’d expect. Hold the phone or watch up to the display and it beeps you in with a big “Go” on the screen, and a “Done” registering on the device. As long as your credit card is up to date, you should be good to go. How quickly this all works when thousands of New Yorkers are all using the system is another question entirely, of course — there tends to be a kind of learning curve with these sorts of things. And no doubt there will be a bit of a logjam at the turnstiles before the novelty of the system wears off.

Of course, that’s why this is still a kind of test period. At present, the system will be limited to the 4, 5, 6 line between Grand Central-42 Street in Manhattan and Atlantic Ave-Barclays Center in Brooklyn (16 stations in all), along with Staten Island buses. In the case of the 4, 5, 6, that’s almost certainly the most heavily trafficked stations on the most heavily trafficked subway line, so this will be an interesting sort of trial by fire.

It’s also worth noting that the system is currently limited to single-ride passes. That means those who buy daily, weekly or monthly passes (which applies to many New Yorkers, myself included) won’t be able to use the system in that capacity. More fare options are coming by late 2020, by which time the MTA expects to have rolled out Apple on all subway lines and buses, so riders will never have to worry about losing that Metro Card again.

Roger, an accounting automation tool that runs on top of accounting software to automate various processes, has raised $7.35 million in Series A funding.

Leading the round is QED Investors, with participation from 9Yards, Silicon Valley Bank, Financial Venture Studio, and BootstrapLabs. A number of individual investors, including Dan Wernikoff, the former GM of QuickBooks and TurboTax, have also backed the Series A.

Claiming to cut the time businesses spend on day-to-day financial processes by as much as 80 percent, Roger works on top of existing accounting software to automate financial processes, such as paying bills, approvals, receipt scanning, compliance and bookkeeping. This is achieved via “simple workflows” that the Denmark and U.S.-based company says anyone can set up and manage.

Customers range from small to mid-sized businesses across virtually any industry to bookkeeping and major accounting firms.

“For businesses, we’re cutting down the time you have to spend in your accounting software dramatically, and help you save time and money on your external accountant or allocate resources better in your in-house finance team,” Roger CEO and co-founder Cathrine Andersen tells me. “You’ll be able to scale your accounting department more easily without adding new headcount”.

To achieve this, Roger consists of a simple web and mobile app that scans incoming documents and ensures that they are seen by the correct person within an organisation. That way they can quickly and efficiently get “coded, approved and reconciled”.

“Roger’s workflow builder is almost like a Zapier for accounting, letting business owners and finance departments set up rules to govern all financial flows, so they can lean back and watch their work get done. Accounting without accounting,” says Andersen.

Meanwhile, for the accountants Roger sells into, Andersen says the startup is helping them stay competitive within a new landscape that is seeing automation becoming a major disruptor.

“This does not mean that there will be no accountants left in 5 years, but it means the industry has to change what services and value they bring to clients and that business models will have to change,” she says. “Any bookkeeper or accounting firm that still spends time on manual processes will likely be faced with questions from their clients and soon a rapidly declining customer base. Clients are starting to see that there are tools out there that can do the grunt work, so why would they pay an hourly fee to do the same thing over and over again every month?”.

To that end, Roger generates revenue in a number of ways. Businesses pay the company a flat monthly subscription fee based on how many documents they process. Accountants are charged a base fee per client, and a price per document.

“Over time, monetizing our large transaction volume of payments will be a key driver of revenue along with other business models that double as cool features to help our network of Roger customers and vendors to run healthier businesses,” adds the Roger CEO.

Twaice, a Munich-based startup developing “predictive analytics” software to help with battery management in electric vehicles and other devices, has raised €2 million in additional seed funding.

The round is led by Berlin’s Cherry Ventures, with participation by existing investors UVC Partners and Speedinvest. It brings the total raised at seed stage by the nine month-old company — a spin out of Technical University of Munich (TUM) — to €3.2 million.

Already used in trucks, cars, e-scooters and stationary power storage, the Twaice software creates a “digital twin” of battery systems by utilising sensor data, and physical and data-driven battery models. From here it claims to be able to analyse and make accurate real-time predictions about the “health status” of an energy storage system.

Use-cases include closing the loop between product development and application, as well as new possibilities such as predictive maintenance and extending a product’s warranty.

“Batteries represent 30 to 50 percent of the electric vehicle costs, but they are complex blackboxes and degrade over lifetime,” Twaice co-founder Dr. Stephan Rohr tells TechCrunch.

“The complexity creates enormous risks and challenges for manufacturers of battery electric vehicles, as they have to test and model the 8 to 10 years lifetime of a battery in only six to 12 months of testing time. And after the start of production the users of these batteries have the challenge to understand how the battery is degrading as the impact of operating parameters on the degradation is too complex and no battery ages like another one”.

Enter Twaice’s “digital twin,” which Rohr says is fed time-continuous data from a device’s battery management system to constantly update the virtual model of the battery with regard to its current condition.

“Through an augmentation of empirical-analytical models and machine learning, we are then also able to predict, simulate and optimize each individual battery’s lifetime,” he says.

To that end, Twaice generates revenue via a Software-as-a-Service model. The young company charges an annual recurring fee per digital twin which scales based on the number of batteries.

DHL is expanding its DHL Africa eShop business to 9 additional markets, upping the presence of the global shipping company’s e-commerce platform to 20 African countries.

DHL went live with the digital retail app in April, bringing more than 200 U.S. and U.K. sellers — from Neiman Marcus to Carters — online to African consumers.

Africa eShop operates using startup MallforAfrica.com’s white label fulfillment service, Link Commerce. Payment methods include local fintech options, such as Nigeria’s Paga and Kenya’s M-Pesa.

DHL’s move to offer Africa eShop to 20 of the continent’s 54 countries comes a month after Africa’s most visible (and well funded) e-tailer, Jumia, went public. Jumia—which operates consumer retail and online service verticals in 14 African countries—raised over $200 million in an NYSE IPO.

There’s a competitive e-commerce scenario brewing between the two platforms. DHL Africa e-Shop touts itself as “Africa’s Largest Online Shopping Platform.” Jumia said “We believe that our platform is the largest e-commerce marketplace in Africa,” in its SEC S1 filing.

It’ll take a little more time to shake out the stats behind each company’s branding claims.

DHL didn’t respond directly to the question of Africa eShop’s new market moves and competition with Jumia. “DHL’s growth expansion has always been centered around satisfying our customer’s wants…Africa e-Shop will be no different,” DHL spokesperson Megan Roper told TechCrunch.

DHL’s app takes advantage of the shipping giant’s existing delivery structure on the continent, able to get goods to doorsteps through its DHL Express courier service.

DHL’s partner for the new app, MallforAfrica, brings experience collaborating with a number of big-name retailers, including Macy’s and Best Buy. MFA’s payment and delivery system serves as a digital broker and logistics manager for big-name retailers to sell goods in Africa.

E-commerce ventures have captured the attention of VC investors looking to tap Africa’s growing consumer markets. McKinsey & Company projects consumer spending on the continent to reach $2.1 trillion by 2025, with e-commerce accounting for up to 10 percent.

Africa’s e-commerce startup landscape has already seen some ups and downs. Jumia’s recent IPO filing on the NYSE is a first for any startup operating in Africa. Despite continuing losses, Jumia’s post-IPO results earned the confidence of Wall Street analysts.

 

DHL’s Africa e-Shop expansion also demonstrates momentum for digital sales on the continent.

On the flip side, the distressed acquisition of Nigerian e-commerce hopeful Konga.com, backed by roughly $100 million in VC, created losses for investors. And in late 2018, Nigerian online sales platform DealDey shut down.

As for the big global names, Alibaba has talked about Africa expansion, but for the moment has not entered in full.

Amazon offers limited e-commerce sales on the continent, but more notably, has started offering AWS services in Africa.

To watch is how DHL’s Africa eShop expansion factors into the continent’s online-sales market, particularly vis-a-vis Jumia.

On a B2C level, Africa eShop brings distinct advantages on a transaction cost basis (i.e. the cost of delivery) given it’s connected to one of the world’s logistics masters.

Another component of DHL and MallforAfrica’s partnership is the market for offering e-commerce fulfillment services. MallforAfrica CEO Chris Folayan acknowledged Jumia as a competitor to his company’s logistics offering, but said, “I’m not building Link Commerce to go after Jumia…I’m building Link Commerce to become the powerhouse e-commerce platform to help emerging markets gain access to U.S. and UK products.” On a call with TechCrunch, Folayan also confirmed Link Commerce would open up to vendors from Asia in the next 12 months.

On its recent earnings call, Jumia CEO Sacha Poignonnec flagged carving out the “Jumia logistics services as a standalone entity” as a future company priority.

These developments could put DHL’s Africa eShop, MallforAfrica, and Jumia on a footing to compete with (or work with) big e-commerce names entering Africa. They certainly add another layer of competition to online retail and fulfillment services on the continent.

For the moment, the DHL Africa eShop expansion creates additional choice on overlapping product categories with Jumia, such as phones, tablets, fashion, health, beauty, and gaming.

Africa eShop will also offer African consumers more price competition in the operating countries it shares with Jumia—currently 10: South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Cameroon, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Senegal, and Ghana.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Uxin, a Chinese second-hand car dealer with Leonardo DiCaprio as its latest brand ambassador, is tipped to get a bag of new funding less than a year after it raised $225 million from its public offering on the Nasdaq.

The company announced on Wednesday that it’s selling $230 million worth of convertible notes to 58.com — China’s answer to Craigslist, Warburg Pincus, TPG and other investors. The notes, due in June, convert to Uxin’s Class A ordinary shares at a price of $1.03 per share or $3.09 per ADS. Upon closing the deal, each of 58.com, Warburg Pincus and TPG will obtain the right to nominate one board director to Uxin.

Uxin was trading at $2.46 at the end of Tuesday, a 74 percent decline from its recent peak in January. Its stock tanked in April after short-seller J Capital Research broadsided it over alleged frauds. Uxin denied the accusations, saying they were “false and misleading.”

The Chinese company is in a bruising fight with well-backed rivals including Chehaoduo, which pocketed $1.5 billion from Softbank’s Vision Fund in February, and Renrenche, which raised $300 million led by Goldman Sachs a year earlier.

As part of the transaction, 58.com, a 14-year-old Chinese internet firm that went public in New York six years ago, will come into a strategic partnership with Uxin in areas such as user traffic and inventory acquisition, used-car inspection, big data analysis and SaaS, says Uxin in a statement. The move follows Uxin’s agreement with Alibaba in December to set up a used car section on the ecommerce giant’s Taobao marketplace.

There are increasing synergies between 58.com and Uxin as both are exploring opportunities outside the crowded markets of China’s megacities. 58.com hit a notable milestone in 2018 after it racked up 100 million new users for its classifieds services customized for small-town populations, which include everything from job listings to trading cars.

In the same vein, Uxin has churned out reports that show demand for used cars coming from China’s lower-tier cities has surged in recent years. The boom is in part a result of a new Chinese policy that allows consumers to buy second-hand cars from a different province, enriching the variety of car options for rural residents.

“We see enormous growth potential in China’s used car market and believe that the volume of used-car transactions will overtake that of new cars in the years ahead,” said Michael Yao, chairman and chief executive officer of 58.com, which runs its own online used car business.

The deal will allow 58 Used Car to “benefit from Uxin’s tremendous offline transaction-related expertise,” added Yao, referring to Uxin’s mix of digital and physical sales channels. “By jointly integrating our online and offline services, we will be ideally positioned to significantly enhance the user experience for purchasing used cars and drive greater efficiency in this growing market.”